THUG: Mbarek Lafrem (above), charged with attacking a nurse in this bar bathroom, was remorseful yesterday in a jailhouse interview.AP

A metal worker accused of viciously beating a nurse in a Hell’s Kitchen bar — and then despicably blaming her for provoking the assault — yesterday blubbered like a baby: “I made a mistake. I have to pay for it.”

His eyes welling with tears during a jailhouse interview at Rikers Island, Mbarek Lafrem, 30, insisted: “I wasn’t myself. I was somebody else” during the attack.

“I’ve never acted like that before.”

Lafrem said he had been drinking “all night and didn’t eat” and claimed that he still can’t recall anything that happened in the Eighth Avenue bar Social early March 11.

“I remember dancing with her. I remember being in the bathroom with her, and I remember her screaming,” said Lafrem, who allegedly pummeled his victim, a pediatric nurse, in a bathroom after she rejected him on the dance floor.

It took 50 stitches to close a laceration across the forehead of the woman, whose name is being withheld by The Post. She also suffered a broken eye socket, a broken nose, skull fractures and a busted jaw, according to court papers.

Lafrem said it was only the next evening after the assault, when he returned home from work, turned on the TV and saw surveillance footage released by the NYPD, that “I knew it was me.”

“I wanted to kill myself because she didn’t deserve that,” he said yesterday.

“I wouldn’t want that to happen to my sisters,” said Lafrem, a native of Morocco who came here in 2004 after winning a visa in a lottery.

The man’s teary-eyed remorse was a total turn-around from his blame-the-victim remarks to detectives after he was busted.

“I was at the bar with the girl. I went into the bathroom, and she started yelling at me,” Lafrem said at the time, according to court papers. “She was coming toward me, so I grabbed her by the arm. She was trying to push me, so I punched her in the face twice and pushed her back into the stall. She fell into the stall and hit her head.”

Asked yesterday what he would now tell the woman, he said, “I’ll give her my life.”

He was arraigned last Saturday on charges of attempted murder, assault and attempted rape.

Lafrem lives in Pennsylvania and was staying at a Midtown hotel while working a construction job at a Fifth Avenue shop. He said that when he got off work, he went to a bar off Fifth Avenue and drank heavily before going to Social.

His fellow workers called cops after recognizing him on the surveillance footage released after the attack.

Lafrem recalled that when detectives showed him a picture of the victim, he said to himself, “Oh, no. I’m in trouble.”